At least 39 dead in Lebanon gun battle

May 21, 2007|By FROM NEWS SERVICES

TRIPOLI, Lebanon — Lebanese tanks pounded the headquarters of a group with suspected links to Al Qaeda in a Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli on Sunday after the northern city's worst clashes in two decades killed 22 soldiers and 17 militants.

The clashes between troops surrounding the Nahr el-Bared camp and Fatah Islam fighters began early in the morning shortly after police raided a militant-occupied apartment on a major thoroughfare in Tripoli and a gun battle erupted, witnesses said.

Hundreds of Lebanese applauded the army as its tanks shelled the camp -- a sign of the long-standing tensions between some Lebanese and the tens of thousands of Palestinians who took refuge from fighting in Israel over the past decades.

"We strongly back the Lebanese army troops and what they are doing," said Abed Attar, a resident of Tripoli who stood watching the tanks fire into the camp while others cheered.

The violence adds one more destabilizing factor to conflict-ridden Lebanon, already in the midst of its worst political crisis between the Western-backed government and pro-Syrian opposition since the end of the 1975-90 Lebanese civil war.

It was a rare clash between the Lebanese army and militants and the first major fighting between the security forces and Palestinians since the early '90s, when troops fought Palestinian guerrillas in Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp in southern Lebanon.